Blog

Permaculture people are my heroes. Mark Lakeman of City Repair is one of them, rocking it with urban design solutions that bring community together to interact between the box spaces of work and home, making living art out of streets and yards.

This keynote speech from the Northern California Permaculture Convergence gives a great overview of his work and the many projects City Repair has engendered. Mark talks about children coming up with design solutions, solar-powered cob neighborhood kiosks, and when people start to become so powerful that they just state to the bureaucrats what's going to happen. This interview is jam-packed with inspiration and replicable projects.

One of my favorite excerpts from this talk is a description of Portland having the first public bike parking shelter in the history of the grid. When the mayor of Portland came to cut the ribbon on the structure, he said: "I didn't even plan to say this today, but I'm the executive of the city and today I declare all these [city repair] projects will be free of permit. The city will insure all these things. We are getting out of the way of facilitating this, because we have a lot to do, and a lot not to do."

"We employ tools of permaculture, natural building and placemaking to create ecological and social relationships that are cyclical, interconnected, symbiotic, and life-affirming. The energetic outputs of our house feeds our gardens, our landscapes, and our communities, which then feed us. We are currently engaged in projects to correct the inefficient, wasteful, and resource intensive structures of our house in order to create a home that is built from natural, local and living materials, and powered by captured energies that pass naturally through our landscape."